Cavaliere Trenta stood beside him in breathless silence.  Was it life or death?  Looking into Fra Pacifico’s motionless face, none could tell.  Pipa was kneeling in a corner, running her rosary between her fingers; she was listening also, with mouth and eyes wide open.

“Her pulse still beats,” Fra Pacifico said at last, betraying no outward emotion.  “It beats, but very feebly.  There is a little warmth about her heart.”

“San Ricardo be thanked!” ejaculated Trenta, clasping his hands.

With the mention of his ancestral saint, the cavaliere’s thoughts ran on to the Trenta chapel in the church of San Frediano, where they had all stood so lately together, Enrica blooming in health and beauty at his side.  His sobs choked his voice.

“Shall I send to Lucca for a doctor?” Trenta asked, as soon as he could compose himself.

“As you please.  Her condition is very precarious; nothing can be done, however, but to keep her warm.  That I see has been attended to.  She could swallow nothing, therefore no doctor could help her.  With such a pulse, to bleed her would be madness.  Her youth may save her.  It is plain to me some shock or horror must have struck her down and paralyzed the vital powers.  How could this have been?”

The priest stood over her, lost in thought, his bushy eyebrows knit; then he turned to Pipa.

“Has any thing happened, Pipa,” he asked, “to account for this?”

“Nothing your reverence,” she answered.  “I saw the signorina, and spoke to her, not ten minutes before I found her lying in the doorway.”

“Had any one seen her?”

“No one.”

“I sent a letter to her from Count Nobili.  Did you see the messenger arrive?”

“No; I was cleaning in the upper story.  He might have come and gone, and I not seen him.”

“I heard of no letter,” put in the bewildered Trenta.  “What letter?  No one mentioned a letter.”

“Possibly,” answered Fra Pacifico, in his quiet, impassible way, “but there was a letter.”  He turned again to interrogate Pipa.  “Then the signorina must have taken the letter herself.”  Slightly raising his eyebrows, a sudden light came into his eyes.  “That letter has done this.  What can Nobili have said to her?  Did you see any letter beside her, Pipa, when she fell?”

Pipa rose up from the corner where she had been kneeling, raised the sheet, and pointed to a paper clasped in Enrica’s hand.  As she did so, Pipa pressed her warm lips upon the colorless little hand.  She would have covered the hand again to keep it warm, but Fra Pacifico stopped her.

“We must see that letter; it is absolutely needful—­I her confessor, and you, cavaliere, Enrica’s best friend; indeed, her only friend.”

At a touch of his strong hand the letter fell from Enrica’s fingers, though they clung to it convulsively.

“Of course we must see the letter,” the cavaliere responded with emphasis, waking up from the apathy of grief into which he had been plunged.